Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Newly hatched.And a
new kind of invertebrate for us to work with: Sipunculan worms.

These little guys were spawned in a dish last week and we
are keeping our eyes on them to see how they grow.What kind of development they have.How long before they settle. At this early stage it’s a bit hard to imagine
how they are going to grow.

Sipunculid worms are often relegated to the “The Lesser
Phyla” in invertebrate text books.It’s
true they are not well-known or well-studied. But they hold great potential to answer some
very interesting questions about developmental processes and how the body plans
of different invertebrate larvae evolve.Dr. Michael Boyle will be joining the CollinLab early in 2012 so we will
all be learning more about these funny looking little worms.

Friday, November 16, 2012

Last
month some of the Collin Lab members set out to the field at first light.They were headed all the way across the
country (a full hour’s drive!) to Galeta Marine Laboratory on the Caribbean
coast of Panama. This lab hosts research
but is primarily used for outreach and education for kids in the city of
Colon.

Panamanian students learning about their

environment from STRI Nature
Guides.

With seagrass lagoons, mangroves and coral

reef patches, Galeta is one
of the most

well-studied Caribbean sites in Panama.

The goal of the trip was to hunt for peanut worms.They are the center of a biological
controversy.Are they regular segmented
annelid worms that have lost their segments.Or is the un-segmented body with a strange inverting proboscis unique
and evolved independent of other worms?We
join Tupper Postdoctoral fellow Michael Boyle in a search of these peanut worms.

Intern Allan Carrillo searches for substrate

The worms are often found inside rock crevices and coral rubble or mud
flats.That’s why, we needed to collect
rocks and coral rubble from shallow water (0.3-2 m).

We didn’t just see worms.If
course, we saw slugs and snails too. The reef-flat is full of interesting invertebrates and seaweeds.

But, most important, we found them!!! A bunch of specimens of Phascolosomaperlucens
and Aspidosiphon sp. that with luck, will
spawn. If they do, Michael might use
them as a model for his studies of evolution of development.

About Us

Research in the Collin Lab focuses on the evolution of life histories and development of marine invertebrates. Our current work uses marine slipper limpets (Calyptraeidae) to try to understand the evolutionary loss and possible reacquisition of feeding larvae.
The Collin Lab is located in Panama City, Panama, at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute's Naos Marine Laboratories, but our field work takes us to various other countries in the Americas.
Using our blog we hope to give you an introduction to the faces in the Collin Lab, as well as a taste of the kinds of projects we are working on and the adventures we have while doing them.
http://www.stri.si.edu/
http://www.stri.si.edu/sites/collinlab/
Some of this material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number (IOS 1019727). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.